Materialism

the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to 'exist' is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of 'material' and all phenomena are the result of material interactions.

• Christian materialism - the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to 'exist' is matter due to the teachings of Christ.

• Dialectical materialism - considered to be the philosophical basis of Marxism, it states that ideas and arguments can only exist as matter and that the subconscious protohuman does not exist.

• Historical materialism - the methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history which was first articulated by Karl Marx. His fundamental proposition of historical materialism can be summed up in the following: It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. — Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to live, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).

• Eliminative materialism - absolute version of materialism and physicalism with respect to mental entities and mental vocabulary, according to which our common-sense understanding of the mind (what eliminativists call folk psychology) is not a viable theory on which to base scientific investigation: behaviour and experience can only be adequately explained on the biological level. Therefore, no coherent neural basis will be found for everyday folk psychological concepts (such as belief , desire and intention, for they are illusory and therefore do not have any consistent neurological substrate. Eliminative materialists therefore believe that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function and some believe that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses.

• Emergent materialism - a philosophy which asserts that the mind is an irreducible existent in some sense, albeit not in the sense of being an ontological simple, and that the study of mental phenomena is independent of other sciences.

• Evolutionary materialism - the philosophical view that the only thing that can truly be said to 'exist' is matter and that the process of observing such existence evolves and changes over time.

• French materialism - a philosophy which holds that both the associationist psychology and Empiricism of John Locke with the Totality of Isaac Newton are correct and compatible with each other.

• Reductive materialism - Reductionism